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Creativity.

This is one requirement that any internet business owner must possess today in order to survive the highly competitive online space.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website if people don’t know that you exist. There are several highly effective methods and strategies being employed by e-commerce sites to create awareness for their site and drive new web traffic. One of these methods is called Viral Marketing.

While the term "viral" brings up a picture of something very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business. Everyone has had enough already of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build up public awareness for one’s product or company. Viral marketing uses many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually directly promoting the product. Instead, it piggybacks on some form of addictive, novel or highly entertaining medium that makes person want to forward it onto everyone they know. Your product or company advertisement then travels along with it and creates increasing exposure for your business, website, product, or service.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a particular medium, or piece of content, they will send it on to their friends and family. The viral advertiser then sponsors this media (e.g. a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story, etc.) which then gets passed along with your company’s brand or logo or the product’s description or any other content that might help to promote your company or your product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one individual at a time deciding to pass on the product to others, the recipient’s openness to receive and open or view the message (since they know the sender they won’t be inclined to block its delivery), and the principle of leverage and exponential growth, i.e. 1 sends it to 5 people, who then send it to 5 people each, who then send it to 5 people each, etc …

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates to help spread their viral marketing message. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the incentive amount or percentage they can assign to each registered promoter.

Using Viral Marketing To Your Advantage

The main advantage of viral marketing is that you can get a lot of publicity and raise significant public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic from potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a large number of people and announce your existence.

Many sites and companies are catching onto the effectiveness of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other methods and strategies for promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and paid advertising, viral marketing can easily put you ahead of your competition.

Viral Marketing can be seen as a "sneaky" but ethical way to get people to know about you and your company. You are getting other people to pass your advertisement along. But then again, this is what many mainstream brands have done by offering so much less (how many people have you seen wearing a t-shirt, pair of shoes or carrying a handbag advertising a company’s brand or log, yet receive no entertainment or amusement, or even a laugh out of the deal?) Viral marketing can also be a low cost strategy if done creatively. For some, all it takes is a great and original idea, an addictive or entertaining medium like a game or video, or even just a funny story. You then create a gossip or a buzz around it and, hopefully, it will have such an impact that others will do the work of sending your viral marketing message along to their friends, family and acquaintances. Many movies today are promoted using scandals, leaks and gossip to make them more popular and desirable before their release. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and some have had great success with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize viral marketing and it has worked incredibly well for them.

But, like I said, you don’t need to be a major company with a ton of money to spend to come up with smart viral marketing strategies. A new company that has recently appeared on the scene and is growing quite rapidly through the use of viral advertising is eCa.sh, which allows you to get paid affiliate commissions for shortening your URLs. It is actually a very clever system that benefits the user, the advertiser and the company that owns the technology. You can check out how it works here: Viral URL Shorterner

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to make it work wonders for you and your business. Put on your creative cap and reap the benefits that Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

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